China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Ruth Rogaski, Princeton University
Chair: James Reardon-Anderson, Georgetown University
Scholars have long considered the role of science and technology in order to define China as a nation possessed of both science and civilization. This panel considers how science and technology played a role in defining the contested frontiers and boundaries of China itself—whether those boundaries were between China and the northern grasslands before 1949; China, The Soviet Union, and the West during the Cold War; or China and the West after 1972.
The individual papers arrange themselves in a coherent order that suggests an intriguing geographical and chronological progression. James Reardon-Anderson’s examination of the boundary between Han China and the northern grasslands in the Qing and Republican periods demonstrates how the state employed technology to expand the boundaries of "China" in Central Asia, and richly details the impact that expansion had on the region’s natural environment. Ruth Rogaski’s paper also deals with China’s use of science and technology to control the natural environment of contested Asian territory, although her focus on the Korean War germ warfare controversy emphasizes the relationship between the Communist state and a Western-oriented generation of Chinese scientists. In his paper on Chinese foreign policy in the decade after Nixon’s visit, James Zheng Gao explores how openness to Western science created concern about China’s political security and anxiety about the cultural boundaries between China and the West that had been so crucial to China’s identity since 1949. These three papers cross traditional boundaries of periodization and combine different methods of inquiry to offer a new perspective on the question of China’s identity.
James Reardon-Anderson, Georgetown University
This paper traces the role of technologies in the transformation China’s northern frontier, from Heilongjiang Province in the east to Gansu Province in the west, and from the founding of the Qing Dynasty in 1644 to the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. For most of this period (until about 1900), the expansion of Chinese people and cultivation was driven primarily by social and economic forces, including the desire of Chinese peasants to escape hardship in China proper and occupy cheap or free land and of Manchu and Mongol landowners to develop or rent land for private gain. These forces resulted in a steady, gradual movement of the line of Chinese occupation and cultivation, while preserving the pastures and way of life of Mongol society. By the turn of the century, these patterns of expansion were altered by the growing threat of Russian and Japanese imperialism in the area and the Qing state’s need for increased revenue. After 1900, the state intervened as an agent of change, actively employing new technologies of engineering, railroads, and agriculture to expand the area of Chinese settlement. As a result, the human and natural environment of the northern territories was transformed in ways that remain central to this region today.
Ruth Rogaski, Princeton University
In the spring of 1952, the government of the People’s Republic of China accused the United States of using biological weapons in North Korea and Manchuria. For the next year and a half, the PRC presented scientific documentation in an attempt to prove its case before domestic and international audiences. This paper analyzes the scientific strategies used by the Chinese in their case for germ warfare—not to test their veracity, but rather to illuminate the political utility of imperial science in the Cold War environment of the early PRC.
The government’s argument hinged on proving that non-native disease vectors had been introduced into Manchuria from outside sources. In order to do this, the government mobilized eminent Chinese scientists in the fields of entomology, botany, and bacteriology to demonstrate their scientific knowledge of what constituted the "native" Manchurian environment. Ironically, this nativist endeavor relied on data from American, Russian, and Japanese scientific expeditions conducted during the decades when Manchuria was politically contested terrain. By utilizing the science of imperial powers, the PRC government sought to demonstrate its ability to know and thus control Manchuria. While the PRC attempted to position itself as a rational, modern member of the international "scientific community," it also used this opportunity to compel Chinese scientists to publicly renounce their past connections with "imperialist" powers and confirm their allegiance to the new government.
James Zheng Gao, Christopher Newport University
This paper examines China’s rediscovery of Western science and technology (S&T) and its impact on foreign policy making between 1972 and 1982, an important decade of dramatic change in China’s relation to the outside world.
From an early contact with the West in the eighteenth century, China exposed itself to Western learning. In the nineteenth century, many of the first Qing diplomats were enthusiasts for Western S&T. Nevertheless, in the Beijing-Moscow "honeymoon" of the 1950s, Western scientific scholarship was ignored or suppressed because of myth of Soviet scientific supremacy.
The rediscovery of Western S&T as part of reestablishing relations with the United States after 1972 triggered a broad questioning of past foreign policy. During this process, Chinese leaders expressed their concern about the implications of Western S&T for the country’s security. China’s technocratic approach to modernization defined contacts with the international scientific community as a government responsibility, reflecting its permanent concern for state control of selective technological borrowing from the West in favor of authoritarian politics. However, the liberalizing impact of Western S&T on China provoked conflicts which went beyond scientific spheres to the political arena, creating Chinese scientific dissent. My research reveals that although the government tried to restrict Western influence, China’s S&T policy in the 1980s aggravated its dependency on Western S&T in modernization programs and China had no alternative but continue the "open-door" policy.